MikeNoLastName - 8:53 pm on Jul 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

Worse still is it possible to poison oneself? I noticed many of our competitors drop drastically with Penguin and in nearly all cases they are ones which (like us) have more than one domain dealing with the same subject. In this case it is totally natural to interlink them, including in in-line text (example: "do not use our red widget when our (link:)green widget will work better" where green widgets are dealt with on a separate domain). Another example is where you want to link to separate page which explains what in general a widget IS. Do you need to duplicate the same description page on both domains? G doesn't seem to like that concept either. Finally there is the case of text navigation links between domains... sorry, but a widget is simply a widget, sometimes there's just no other thing to call it. Does G know you own all the domains and are linking them for totally legitimate, and user helpful reasons, most likely not, but they should!

If you read back in the early html1.0 references, the whole concept of hyperlinking was invented/intended precisely for this inline use, not for how it has been twisted, misused and is now expected to be used by G. Because early surfers (and early site writers) were inept about clicking on blue text everyone started saying "CLICK HERE". Although not proper, early incorporators discovered this worked very well, until G came along and assumed this was a clue that the linked to page was about "click here"'s.

G's algorithms simply are not smart enough to do what they are trying to do, so they are penalizing those of us smart enough (and perhaps outdated enough) to use the internet as it was ORIGINALLY intended. With great power (a majority of the internet search market) comes great responsibility and G simply is not up to the challenge.

And no, having a domain over 15 years old and many pages with HTML 2.0 in the header does not apparently exempt you :-).